Tinker Gnome

A tinker gnome stands around 3 feet tall and weighs 45 to 50 pounds, with females matching males in size. Stocky as they are, they move with grace, and their hands are skilled and steady. Skin is a warm, rich brown, hair white and either curly or straight, and eyes china blue or violet. Their teeth are straight and never decay. Males sport white whiskers and beards, soft and curly. Men and women alike have the big gnomish nose and rounded ears, and wrinkles appear after about age 50.

Their voices sound human but more nasal. Among themselves they talk at frantic speed in one endless sentence, listening and speaking simultaneously, so two gnomes can trade questions and answers without either pausing. With other races they have learned to slow down and enunciate. A scared or gloomy gnome tends to speak in unusually short bursts.

Fashion is not their gift: only gully dwarves and goblins dress worse. Anything reasonably clean will do, though scarves, shawls and stiff leather shoes are favorites, and in the workshop they wear smocks and coats that wipe clean.

Apart from adventurers, tinkers rarely go armed, though many of their tools can double as weapons. New and questionable weapons are always in development; the three-barrel water blaster is nearly worthless, while the multiple spear flinger shows some potential. Preferred arms are darts, slings, short bows, light and hand crossbows, and throwable melee weapons such as hand axes and hammers. Teams of gnomes sometimes crew elaborate catapult engines that hurl boulders, water bags or rubbish. Any armor is allowed, but a typical tinker wears a jumble of mismatched pieces worth AC 5.

Colonies are enormous tunnel systems dug into remote mountains. The greatest, a mountain-city home to tens of thousands, roars with steam, whistles, grinding gears and flashing lights. Countless stairways, ramps, ladders and pulley lifts link its levels, while gnome-hurling catapults and steam rail cars provide quick transport. Below it sprawls an ancient warren of tunnels and mines that harbors dangerous monsters and hostile underground races, and some passages serve as dumps for toxic waste. Smaller colonies in hills and mountains elsewhere seldom top 200-400.

Every tinker belongs to a guild. There are around 50 major ones, among them Mathematics, Education, Chemistry, Weapons, Kinetics, Hydraulics, Mechanical Engineering, Hydrodynamics and Architecture, plus many minor ones. The life sciences belong solely to the Agricultural and Medical Guilds, and impractical sciences such as Astronomy stay small and weak. The Priests Guild is the sole guild ever to die out; its duties passed to the Philosophers and the Medical Guild.

Each gnome pursues a Lifequest to perfectly understand one device. Hardly any succeed, so the race lives in permanent dissatisfaction. Clan heads and guild masters elected for life form the Grand Council, though each group chooses its members differently. The council is so smothered in procedure that it seldom decides anything important; guilds and clans simply act on their own agendas. Everyone demands strict obedience to the rules, yet the rules take so long that even gnomes lose patience.

A gnome's true name is a complete family history that runs to many thousands of letters. For daily use it goes by a summary of ancestral highlights that takes about thirty seconds to say. Other races clip that to the first syllable or two, which gnomes find undignified but tolerate. Every colony has sages who fill endless volumes with committee facts, guesses and philosophical scribbles that mean nothing to anyone but their authors.

The forge god is the only deity they honor, imagined as a gnome of great size who embodies the joy of making things; the sun and moons count as his inventions. There are no formal services, only sincere respect. Most gnomes stay home with their projects, but some become adventurers: jacks-of-all-trades who never learn from past errors, yet who often rescue companions with some bizarre improvised fix. Anything at all sends them reaching for notebooks or tool belts.

Gnomish devices rely on gears, pulleys, screws, windmills and waterwheels in needlessly complex combinations. Gnomes refine their inventions until they stop working, discarding simple answers for redundant ones, and as a result their technology has barely touched the cultures around them.

Other races mostly dislike tinkers, finding their machine-mindedness alien in a world of magic and their social sense badly lacking. The Agricultural Guild feeds the colony with fungus farms and flocks of cave sheep. Its research into artificial food has not yet produced anything edible.

Mad gnomes look and act like tinkers but have no knack for technology, and nearly all of them come from distant lands. Any gnome born off the tinkers' home world counts as mad. A native tinker rolls 1d100 each year; on a 100 it rolls again, and a second 100 turns it into a mad gnome, which keeps its technical skills. Foreign mad gnomes living among normal gnomes may learn those skills with a 1% chance, checked once per six months spent there; the chance never accumulates.

Mad gnomes who can build machines do it wrong by gnomish standards: their devices are elegant, efficient and work far too well. They gain +3 to any success roll for creating a device, and the result always comes out 1d6 sizes more compact than the usual gnomish version.